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Chapter 17. Using Swing Components

In the previous chapter, we discussed a number of concepts, including how Java’s user
interface facility is put together and how the fundamental pieces work. You should
understand what components and
containers are, how they work together to create a display, what events are, how
components use them to communicate with the rest of your application, and what layout
managers are.

Now that we’re through with the general concepts and background, we’ll get to the fun
stuff: how to do things with Swing
. We will
cover most of the components that the Swing package supplies, how to use these
components in applets and applications, and how to build your own components. We will
have lots of code and lots of pretty examples to look at.

There’s more material on this topic than fits in a single chapter. In this chapter,
we’ll cover all the basic user interface components. In the next chapter, we’ll cover
some of the more involved topics: text components, trees, tables, and creating your own
components.

Buttons and Labels

We’ll start with the simplest components:
buttons and labels
. Frankly, there isn’t much to say about
them. If you’ve seen one button, you’ve seen them all, and you’ve already seen
buttons in the applications in Chapter 2
(HelloJava3 and HelloJava4). A button generates an ActionEvent when the user presses it. To receive these events, your
program registers an ActionListener, which must
implement the actionPerformed() method. The ...

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